Reid, between the lines

No one doubts Harry Reid is tough. The man grew up in rural Nevada with the nickname “Pinky” and, at 68, still does 120 pushups, three mornings a week.

The real question for the quirky Senate Democratic leader is how best to show that toughness to the world and to a hostile White House.

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Will Reid always be cast as the loner and schoolyard brawler who channeled his aggression into boxing? Or will he show another side, that of the high school baseball catcher who could block the plate but also call a pitch, someone who marvels today at another “not-so-big” kid from Vegas who lives by his wits, Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Greg Maddux.

“He was a grinder,” says Don Wilson, a star second baseman on Reid’s high school team. “He didn’t have a whole lot of natural talent. ... But he had a good glove. He studied the hitters, and he caught batting practice as seriously as when he was in the game. He had tenacity.”

Baseball and boxing: two sides of Harry Reid that help explain why he is a puzzle to many. He rose in the Democratic leadership as a shrewd Senate insider, skilled at reading people and being able to reach across the aisle with a wry sense of humor. But the Democratic takeover in 2006 pushed Reid into a more public, less comfortable role, where he has felt stiffed by President Bush and compelled to swing back even as he has struggled to define himself as majority leader.

“It puts me in a situation where, what am I supposed to do, walk away?” Reid says in an interview. “Part of my personality is, you just can’t run from a fight.”

“Fighting Harry” has become the chosen brand for Reid’s handlers, already preparing for what could be a tough reelection bid at home in Nevada in 2010. “The Good Fight — Hard Lessons From Searchlight to Washington” is the title of a forthcoming memoir. Excerpts recently leaked to The New York Post include a description of Reid beating “the crap” out of a mama’s boy in eighth grade — in front of the boy’s mother, the teacher.

But like in those fights in his past, Reid can’t escape being bruised himself. “You never won. You always got hurt,” he recalls. Decades later, Republicans caricature him as a punch-drunk brawler, lunging and missing his target.

“I consider him a friend,” says Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), but the aggressive tactics of younger conservatives echo the “Gaslight” strategy Republicans used against former Democratic leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) in the ’80s. The goal then was to push the aging West Virginian over the edge, just as a sadistic Charles Boyer tried to rattle Ingrid Bergman in the famous 1944 George Cukor movie. For a man so shrewd, Reid has repeatedly fallen off message and been forced to rescind threats or apologize for his insults. “He ‘Gaslights’ himself,” jokes one Republican aide, recalling Reid shaking with anger last week after being drawn into a floor fight with a Texas freshman whom a leader of Reid’s status might have better ignored.

Next to the more polished House speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Reid can seem the odd man out and stubbornly partisan, as in last month’s economic stimulus debate. White House aides were offended by the accusatory tone of a recent Reid letter complaining about nominations.

Thomas Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, sees Reid as trapped by two forces. One is Bush’s decision to move right to his Republican base, and not to the political center, after his party lost power in 2006. That is the opposite of what Bill Clinton did in 1994 and what Ronald Reagan did after Republicans lost seats in the ’80s — and it leaves a dealmaker like Reid stranded, Mann says.

Second is the change in Congress itself with the rise of modern, ideologically driven political parties.

The Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate such parties when crafting their system of checks and balances between the three branches of government, Mann says. Given the rules of the Senate, the existence of such partisan-minded parties allows members of the minority — more loyal to their party and the president — to work with the executive branch to frustrate Reid’s narrow legislative majority.

All this falls on a man who lacks Job’s patience, if not his troubles.